I don’t know. Sheep like to park below panels too.
Here’s the largest solar farm in California. It covers sand. Also, solar panels don’t block 100% of the light getting to the ground, so different species of plants and animals can live and thrive under them. The land under solar panels is not lost to natural use. Life will adapt.
That said, solar panels over car parks is also a good idea. Both things can be true.
This is emotionally resonant but it’s actually sometimes better to cover fields. The right thing is not always intuitive.
Because with how many parking lots there are in the US it would crash the cost of electricity by sending supply to the moon.
Can’t have that. Oligarch lobbyism go brrr.
cost. it’s significantly more expensive to cover parking lots and roofs than fields, because somebody has to climb a ladder to install it.
also many places are already covering the parking lots. which is mostly as a marketing gag i suspect, or to produce the electricity themselves that they feed to the cars instead of having to buy it over the grid. which might be cheaper if the grid has high profit margins.
I’ll do you one better
Replace most city car infrastructure by bicycle infrastructure. The few remaining required car parks? Move those underground under buildings and parks. Then those places that used to be car parks, make those actual parks to walk and sometimes cycle in
Then move solar on top of building roofs
bicycle-mostly infrastructure is ableist.
Actually, with climate change in the back of the mind, covering fields with solar panels (not 100%, only partially) will reduce heat damage and water usage in the height of summer, and also protect the ground during cold spells of winter. So it is not that stupid after all.
That covering car parks with solar is a good idea is completely independent of this.
Plants need direct light to grow… most need full sun. Personally all the solar farms I’ve seen just “grow” grass and everything is kept trimmed down to not cast shade on the panels. Putting the panels up higher would still cast any plants grown in deep shade. I think putting them in places deep shade is needed/wanted on the ground makes sense and because cities tend to be hotter due to paving using solar panels to cast shade would help lower the temps in cities, lowering power usage on things like AC. I think integrating solar into urban landscapes is the future
Plants need direct light to grow… most need full sun
Except for all the plants that evolved and thrive in the low light beneath tree foliage. Evolution is not so picky as a pretty houseplant.
Plants need direct light to grow… most need full sun.
The humble Monotropa uniflora:
Plants need direct light to grow… most need full sun.
That’s only true, if the solar panels are not properly adjusted to this use case.
The solution for that is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics#Spectrally_selective_modules
It’s not a bad idea to have energy production near where the energy is being used.
That said, it’s not an either or.
Technology Connections actually did a great video on why using solar panels in place of crops can benefit the crops and actually provides more energy than the crops themselves. At least in the U.S., a huge portion of our crops are used for ethanol in gasoline anyway.
Ooooof course it is
Or, or, hear me out. Deprioritize cars. Build public transportation/car free spaces/walkable cities, reduce/eliminate parking lots. Require smaller more fuel efficient vehicles. Build solar panels on rooftops/windowpanes. Plant and protect trees and other native plants.
both. both is good.
Nah, I’d rather leave the fields open for nature or farming.
In America, if we only replaced the fields growing corn for Ethanol production to add to gasoline, leaving every other field alone, we’d have enough energy to power the whole country with a huge surplus to spare. We’re already using the fields for energy production, we’re just being inefficient about it.
Agrisolar exists. If the US converted just a few % of the acreage legally mandated for growing corn for ethanol to solar, the energy crisis essentially solves itself.
Farming is much worse for land than PV. PV is almost as good as leaving it untouched, while farming ruins biodiversity through monoculture, nitrate and phosphate pollution, and possibly pesticides.
Large-scale ground-mounted PV is fine and people need to get over it. If you are in the mood to publicly advocate for more environmentally friendly land use, go and protest the grotesque waste of land for crops like corn and sorghum used to produce bioethanol fuels.
On the other hand, I do enjoy eating food
And like I said, vast amounts of farmland are for fuels, not for food. So effectively harvesting energy like PV, just much slower, much less efficient and much worse for the ground and fauna.
Only bc we choose to farm in the most aggressive and anti nature way possible. Other techniques do exist and are being reintroduced in some areas
They should at least replace the fields producing corn ethanol. Saves the recurring cost of producing the energy, and reduces the emissions of both harvesting and burning.
Huge swathes of land are used just to burn the output.
Bro we’re gonna starve.
The foundations used to support both pictures are the same: W6x9 or W6x10.4 W-beams.
Carports are more expensive, though, because those foundations need to be just as long as the ground-mount ones + 14’ to support the panels above parking spaces. And often, ground-mounts can use alternative foundations like helical piles or ground screws which don’t need to be embedded as deep as W-beams. This shaves down foundation costs.
Then, you have to consider the steel trusses needed to distribute complex carports loads, which are simplified or non-existent with ground-mounts.
Then, you often have concrete encasements around carport foundations to protect the foundations from vehicles collisions.
All of this contributes to carport solar PV being the MOST expensive out of any alternative.
And if anyone is curious, for Commercial & Industrial (C&I) solar in urban/suburban contexts, cost effective PV usually goes roof-mount < ground-mount < canopy-mount. For utility/DG-scale, ground-mount is king.
How about we don’t cover our fields with car parks?
Too radical for Americans
With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hot spot?
By and large we don’t. 53% percent of the surface area of the US is farmland. 28% of it is protected federal lands of some stripe or another — national forests and national parks, BLM land, etc. Everything else, all the remaining cities and suburbs and coal burning power plants, freeways, stroads with no bike lanes, Walmarts, and strip malls are all packed into the remainder. Most of that is along the coasts. The US is absolutely full of wide, huge, horizon-to-horizon, enormous expanses with nothing in them.
It’s just that our populated areas, largely along the costs, are utter hellholes.
This is ridiculously untrue and confuses too much of what matters for food
The raw numbers are very misleading. First, although only (!) 53% of U.S. has been ecologically devastated by farming, the 28% of “protected” federal land is often leased for cattle rangeland, clear-cut by logging companies, or what environmentalists derisively call, “rocks and ice.”
The small remainder has been carved up by roads. It would be one thing if all of the pavement were one, contiguous blob in the middle of the New Mexico desert, but it is laced across the landscape from coast to coast. The effect on wildlife has been profound, from direct impact to roadkill numbers, to fragmention of ecosystems, to pollution from tailpipe emissions and road surface runoff.
It’s not about the space that cars physically occupy (though that is a major issue in cities), but rather the almost-apocalyptic effect they have had on the natural world. We would be better off if we didn’t build all of the parking lots on farmland (or anywhere).
I just drove through New Mexico hundreds upon hundreds of miles of nothingness
It can be really good to cover the fields!
Reduce evaporation, expand the range of plants that can grow and provide subsidies for hard pressed farmers
Protecting food and water resources are going to get increasingly important over the next few decades
Every single time this gets posted: Both is good.
Yes. Both, not either or. Where is that shitty competition thinking coming from?
In Switzerland, there was a vote on a petition requiring new houses to include solar panels. Conservatives opposed it, arguing that construction costs were already too high without such regulations. Instead, those same people want to build massive solar farms on untouched natural landscapes. To me, the reason is obvious: energy companies want to maintain control over a centralized power infrastructure. This way, they can keep charging us high electricity prices while pocketing subsidies for infrastructure projects.
Ding ding ding that is correct!
Put them everywhere. I don’t care where they go. I want my son and daughter to have a planet to enjoy and raise a family in.
The cynic in me suspects it’s an attempt to sow division within pro-solar panel groups. Get them arguing amongst themselves over where to put them, rather than uniting to push for more panels.
Farmers are the biggest welfare queens in this country. They all bitch and moan about needing subsidies and everything but they all have crop insurance.
Generally speaking these are the large companies doing this while pretending to be small farmers.
Farmer A through F are family members. They each have their “own” farm, just inside the limit to make it a small farm. Farmer A also has a “small” farm with Farmer B, and C, and D, and E, and F, each qualifying as a “small” farm. Do the same with the rest of the mixes.
The reality is that these “small” farms are really one 400 acre farm run by the same people, worked by the same people (migrants being taken advantage of with illegally low wages).
The actually small farms do benefit from a lot of the programs, and that can be a really good thing. Its unfortunate though that there are enough loopholes that large scale corporate farming finds ways to abuse the system by cosplaying as “small farm” owners.
Saw a documentation a few days ago. It was about a berry Farmer who put solarpanels above his berries to shield them from direct sunlight. Works great! And He could replace all his transporters with EVs. :)
I’ve seen plenty of different types of solar panels, some specifically for agriculture use that have small gaps between the solar cells to allow for more sun to reach plants.
I’m not sure how that affects solar panel output/longevity but it can’t be too much of a hit.
Both will be necessary to generate enough power
